EDITORIAL

Get US Out of WTO

Perhaps the best thing that can come out of the invasion of Iraq
(other than the freeing of its people from the rule of Saddam
Hussein) is the backlash by the rest of the world against the US
government's demonstration that it will do what is in the interest of
its business elites, backed by its unparalleled military force,
regardless of what the rest of the world thinks.

Free-trade talks with Morocco, moved from Rabat to Geneva amid
security concerns, now may be delayed, as Moroccan officials fear
rising anti-US sentiment, the Wall Street Journal reported April 4. A
US-Chile deal, finalized in December, faces trouble in Congress after
Chile refused to back the war resolution at the United Nations. Some
Congress members are hesitant to extend normal trade relations to
Russia, which also opposed the use of force in Iraq.

US Trade Rep. Robert Zoellick (a former lobbyist for Enron) hopes
to reach an agreement on a trade deal with Central American nations
by the end of the year. Leftist presidents in Brazil and Venezuela
might stand in the way of plans for a Free Trade Area of the Americas
(or, as Jim Hightower refers to it, "NAFTA on Steroids"). And given
war rifts with Europe and Moslem nations, global talks at the World
Trade Organization aren't expected to be finished by a deadline of
the end of next year. Only five countries -- Australia, Canada,
Japan, New Zealand and the US -- met the March 31 deadline to file
offers of areas to be opened up to foreign companies under the
General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).

Globalization sounds good, as "free trade" promises to open every
nation's industry to foreign trade, eliminate stodgy old tariffs and
welcome foreign corporations to do business in a worldwide free
market. But as Greg Palast noted in his excellent book, The Best
Democracy Money Can Buy (recently published by Plume in an updated US
paperback edition), the "free trade" story also involves cutting
pensions, cutting welfare, cutting subsidies that help farmers and
industry compete against lower-cost producers and letting health and
labor standards fall to the lowest common denominator.

Palast, a California native, now practices investigative
journalism for the BBC and the Guardian and Observer newspapers in
London because, he quips, investigative reporting has become illegal
in the US. Palast writes about an unassuming six-page WTO memo he got
his hands on, a summary of a March 2001 meeting of member nations'
trade ministers that was supposed to remain secret. The memo set out
the trade group's plan of attack on the regulatory authority of
governments. GATS proposes to replace sovereignty with a "necessity
test" that allows GATS dispute panels, meeting in secret, to
determine if a law or regulation is "more burdensome than necessary."
If the panel decides the law or regulation is too burdensome, the
government will be required to relax it or reimburse affected
corporations for damages.

A similar provision in the North American Free Trade Agreement
allowed a Canadian producer of the gasoline additive MBTE to sue the
state of California for banning the additive after it was found to
contaminate water supplies. The Canadians argued that there were
other, less trade restrictive ways to prevent the additive from
leaking into groundwater. Now California has the choice of backing
down and allowing the pollutant to remain as a gasoline additive or
pay the producer nearly $1 billion in damages.

Environmental groups have sued to halt the Bush administration's
proposed change to the popular "dolphin-safe" labeling law for tuna
after the White House announced on Dec. 31, 2002, that it planned to
weaken the rules protecting dolphins from encirclement nets used to
catch tuna. Since 1992, the US has been under orders to weaken the
dolphin law after it was ruled to be an illegal trade barrier by an
international tribunal under the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT).

Under GATS the "more burdensome than necessary" standard is even
more business-friendly than "least trade restrictive" standard in
NAFTA, Palast says. Among other things, he writes, GATS would prevent
local governments from adopting zoning rules prohibiting giant retail
stores such as Wal-Mart. The March 2001 memo specifies that trade
ministers agreed that simply "safeguarding the public interest" would
not be an acceptable defense for a regulation that limited
businesses.

The memo suggests, "It may well be politically more acceptable to
countries to accept international obligations which give primacy to
economic efficiency." In other words, unaccountable GATS can do
things that rulers know their Congress or parliaments would never
accept.

We believe in fair trade rules that raise labor and health
regulations to the standards of the developed world, instead of
reducing them to the level of the Third World. It might be too much
to hope that the worldwide fear and resentment of George W. Bush and
his cronies will ungrease the skids of globalization, but it's worth
a try. If the US is too good to surrender its sovereignty to the UN
or the World Court, it shouldn't knuckle under to the World Trade
Organization either.

The Road from Baghdad

Even before US troops had taken Baghdad there was a struggle over
who will rule Iraq after Saddam. We doubt that George W. Bush and his
brain trust have any intention of allowing the people of Iraq to
control their own destiny. Iraq's majority Shi'ite Muslims, if left
to their own devices, probably would massacre Sunnis who formed the
base for the Ba'ath Party that at least ran a secular government and
resisted Islamic fundamentalists. The Shi'ites also likely would run
the Christian minority out of the country and seek an alliance with
Iran. Kurds in the north are in no mood to rejoin the rest of Iraq,
but if they try to break off to form Kurdistan Turkey has warned it
will intervene.

The US already has set up retired US Air Force Gen. Jay Garner to
run Iraq, along with other high-profile Americans, including former
CIA director Jim Woolsey to run the Ministry of Information. British
Prime Minister Tony Blair and most of the rest of the world think the
UN should be brought in to legitimize the new Iraqi order. A bitter
struggle also is shaping up over who gets contracts to rebuild Iraq
and its oil production.

The Pentagon, led by Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle and Wolfowitz, want
to replace the Ba'athists with the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a
group of exiles led by Ahmed Chalabi. He is largely unknown in Iraq,
since his family fled in 1958 when the Ba'ath Party overthrew the
monarchy, but Chalabi is best known in the Mideast for the
spectacular 1989 failure of his Petra Bank in neighboring Jordan.
That resulted in 1992 fraud convictions against Chalabi on 31 charges
of embezzlement, theft, misuse of depositor funds and currency
speculation after he skipped the country. The CIA severed its
relationship with INC after it was unable to account for millions of
dollars in covert US aid. But the Pentagon reinstated the aid and now
Chalabi appears to be Bush's choice to follow Washington's orders.
Maybe Bush can also find a spot for his old pal Ken Lay in
Baghdad.

And while the US focuses on taking out Saddam the Taliban is
moving back into Afghanistan -- remember Afghanistan? Al Qaeda's
Osama bin Laden, who unlike Saddam actually has a connection to 9/11,
remains at large and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said the US-led
war on Iraq would produce "100 new bin Ladens" as Muslims are driven
to militancy.

Former CIA director Woolsey, in an April 2 speech at the
University of California in Los Angeles, said the invasion of Iraq
was merely the opening campaign of World War IV (assuming the Cold
War was WWIII). The new war, he said, is actually against three
enemies: the religious rulers of Iran, the "fascists" of Iraq and
Syria, and Islamic extremists like al Qaeda.